David Cameron's clamour to open the EU treaties to get a new deal for Britain in Europe could trigger a whole stream of risky national votes, senior EU officials have said amid exasperation with the prime minister's abrupt concession to Tory backbenchers on the referendum bill.

European leaders declined to say anything publicly about the Conservative plans for a draft bill on an in-out EU referendum. It is being interpreted in Brussels as internal Tory party politicking, but privately there is acute and increasing frustration with Cameron's tactics.

They complained that while in Washington Cameron launched another round of Brussels-bashing when he was supposed to be promoting the merits of a potential gamechanging trade pact between the EU and the US.

"It's the frustration, even on things like this when it would be better to talk up the EU. You would actually have thought this was just a US-UK trade pact," said one official. "It's the kind of stuff where you just feel you're banging your head off the wall."

Another senior official said: "It's pure political posturing. Pure ideology. British pragmatism has gone away."

Officials also pointed to the irony of George Osborne being in Brussels on Tuesday to push strongly for an EU deal to curb tax evasion even while the talk in his party ranks was about quitting the EU.

The jury is out on whether Cameron will win his fight to get a fiendishly complicated renegotiation of the Lisbon treaty, with the aim of securing new British terms of EU membership that would then be put to a referendum in 2017 if Cameron wins a second term in 2015.

The big political changes being made in the eurozone as a result of the currency crisis would warrant a renegotiation, Brussels concedes. But there are major political obstacles in the member states militating against reopening the treaty.

Even before a vote on a new settlement in Britain, a revised Lisbon treaty would certainly trigger referendum calls in Ireland or Denmark.

"Then you have the domino effect. What about the Netherlands, Sweden, France. [President François] Hollande's position is key. He needs a referendum like a hole in the head," said one of the officials.

Opinion polls show a pattern of collapsing support for the EU in France while Hollande's ratings are at historical lows for a French president. Hollande was traumatised by France's rejection of an EU constitution in 2005 and would seek to avoid any such repetition.

"There will be huge pressure for referendums," said one of the senior sources. "But politicians are unlikely to start on the road to referendums if they think they will lose them."

There is also exasperation in EU capitals that Cameron has declined, as yet, to flesh out what kind of changes he wants or which policy areas he hopes to renegotiate. The puzzlement extends to British officials and business. A delegation from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) was in Brussels on Monday and sounded out the European Commission about what Downing Street wanted because they have not been told. Similar puzzlement surrounds the battery of EU police, justice, and security measures that Britain needs to renegotiate, a policy recently severely criticised by a House of Lords inquiry as damaging the British national interest.

Under the Lisbon treaty Britain has to opt out of more than 130 EU police and justice instruments en bloc and then re-negotiate the bits it wants to retain with other EU governments and with the European Commission.

Senior commission sources say the home secretary, Theresa May, has not contacted Cecilia Malmstrom, one of the commissioners responsible, since last year.